"She was a good girl."
"Never caused trouble."
"Must have been someone passing through town."
The same vague descriptions. The same lack of specificity. The same reluctance to point fingers within their own community.
What struck him hardest was the timeline. According to Kelly's neatly organized notes, Lori had been missing for almost forty-eight hours before the police launched a serious search. The initial reports dismissed her disappearance as a teenage girl "blowing off steam" or "running away with a boyfriend."
It wasn't until her maternal grandparents had pushed law enforcement that police were finally mobilized. Lori’s own parents hadn’t had much of a sense of urgency, but at least the grandparents had stepped in.
By then, crucial time had been lost. And even then, they hadn't called in the state police for assistance until after Lori's body was found.
"Amateur hour," Ben growled, his fingers pressing so hard against the pages that they crinkled at the edges.
He picked up the witness statements from Lori's friends, including a much younger Kelly. Her statement was brief, barely a paragraph. There was no follow-up, no detailed questioning about Lori's final days, her relationships, her habits.
There was no attempt to recreate her last days, which was a fairly well-known investigative tactic called forensic victimology. Kelly was the last known person to have spoken by phone with Lori, yet her statement was treated as an afterthought.
If I checked the statistics in this little town, I bet I’d find that this might be a singular murder in decades.
The police officers simply hadn’t a clue how to handle the investigation, probably because they’d never had to before.
The suspect list was even more troubling. According to Kelly’s notes, Mr. Caldwell, a high school teacher, had shown inappropriate interest in Lori. His name appeared exactly twice in the file. Once, when another student mentioned it, and again in a brief interview, he immediately asked for a lawyer. After that, nothing. He'd been dropped as a suspect without any apparent investigation.
By contrast, Lori's boyfriend, Callum Henderson, merited only cursory attention despite what should have been intense scrutiny. Star quarterback, son of the high school principal, with an alibi provided by his teammates that was never verified independently.
The investigators had accepted his story without question: he'd been at football practice, then gone straight home to study. No one had checked the practice attendance, spoken to histeachers about any assignments due, or even asked to see his study materials.
Protected. Obviously, blatantly protected.
What the hell is wrong with these people? Did they not care?
Instead, the police had fixated on a "drifter theory”. That some nameless, faceless outsider who happened into Bergen murdered a teenage girl and vanished without a trace. It was convenient. It was clean. It absolved the community of harboring a killer.
It was also completely unsupported by evidence.
Ben paused over a newspaper clipping Kelly had included. A photo of Robert Powell, Lori's father, speaking at a press conference. The caption identified him as "local business leader and nephew of former State Senator James Powell."
Another clipping mentioned Elizabeth Powell, Lori's mother, chairing a charity gala for the local children's hospital, "continuing her commitment to community service despite her family's recent tragedy."
From what Ben could see, the Powells weren't just any family in Bergen. They were Bergen royalty.
And their daughter's murder investigation had been a whitewash from start to finish.
Ben understood small towns. He'd grown up in one. He knew how they could close ranks, how they protected their own, how they manufactured narratives that preserved their self-image as safe, wholesome communities where bad things only happened when outsiders brought trouble.
Harper wasn't so different from Bergen in that respect. The difference was that Harper had had Seth Reilly as its sheriff, a man who believed justice mattered more than comfort, more than politics, more than preserving pretty illusions. He’d been all about the truth and didn’t give a rat’s ass about anyone’s comfort or community standards.
At times, it hadn’t made him popular.
Ben couldn’t suppress a smile as he remembered the times his dad would ruffle feathers in their town, and the town council would clutch their pearls, whining how Seth should just leave it alone.
His dad hadn’t budged.
Lori Powell had deserved that kind of justice. Instead, she'd gotten performative investigative theater, a show of activity that deliberately led nowhere.
What were they afraid to find? Were there some skeletons in the Powell family closet, perhaps?
